Average people in America think government doesn't work. Think again.
Government actually does work. It works for the people who pay it to work for them.
-- Hedrick Smith, NH Rebellion rally
Nashua, NH, 1-24-2014
This week's featured posts: "The Fall of Governor Ultrasound" and "One Week's Worth of Crazy"
This week Republicans started talking about another debt ceiling crisis
Because the last one worked out so well, I guess. But you can tell this is an organized effort because they're using the same words. Both Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz called a clean debt-ceiling increase "irresponsible". John Boehner is also hinting at attaching ransom demands.
It's important to keep in mind exactly what this all means: Congress just passed a two-year budget deal last month. That deal included a budget deficit that will push the national debt over the current debt ceiling. Now Republicans want to take a position against the debt that they just approved. You see, they're for keeping taxes lower than spending; they're just against borrowing the difference. Get it?
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew estimates the disaster deadline is the end of February.
and the Bob McDonnell indictment
which I cover in "The Fall of Governor Ultrasound". One of the issues that gets raised by this case is "the fine line between what is illegal versus what is unseemly". Ditto for the latest out of Florida, where Governor Scott's chief fund-raiser (who has donated over $1 million himself) got billions in Medicaid-management contracts for his companies. Illegal, or just unseemly?
And Bridgegate just keeps percolating along. Subpoenas are out, testimony is being taken. I'm sure the U.S. attorney will let us know when he has something.
and the Republican winter meetings
(Mike Huckabee's winter-meetings speech is one of many incidents covered in "One Week's Worth of Crazy".)
The main news to come out the meetings was that Republicans are shortening their nomination process for 2016: Primaries will start later and end sooner. They want to hold the early primaries in February -- in 2012 the Iowa caucuses were January 3, almost a week before the last bowl game -- and to have the convention in late June or early July, rather than late August.
It's fascinating to compare the Democrats' nomination process in 2008 to the Republicans' in 2012. Both were national road shows that seemed to go on forever. But the eternal Obama/Clinton struggle worked in the Democrats' favor: Each new primary state became the focus of a voter registration drive that helped Obama in the fall. When Republicans tried to raise the Jeremiah Wright/Bill Ayers issues, they seemed like old news because Obama had faced them already in the primaries. In general, Obama gained stature each time he debated the more famous Clinton head-to-head.
By contrast, Republicans came out of 2012 with a never-again attitude. Romney had to fend off a series of flawed boom-candidate-of-the-week challengers: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and finally Rick Santorum. Each seemed like a joke to the non-Republican electorate, and the fact that each was succeeded by the next just emphasized how little the Republican base wanted to nominate Romney.
The 2004 Democratic nomination process demonstrated that the phrase "too far left" actually meant something: Dennis Kucinich was too far left, and the main debate in the early primaries was whether Howard Dean was too. But in 2012, "too far right" was meaningless to Republicans. In the debates, the candidates competed to be the most conservative, and the audiences seemed even more extreme: They booed a gay soldier in Iraq, cheered letting the uninsured die, cheered waterboarding, and applauded the fact that Rick Perry had executed 234 prisoners.
To be blunt, the Republican base is a freak show, and the longer they are on camera the worse it is for the eventual nominee. The RNC recognized that this week, and acted accordingly. As 2016 gets closer, expect them also to limit the number of debates and put them off as long as possible. If they could hold the primary campaign inside a bell jar, they would.
and you also might be interested in ...
Lawrence Lessig's frigid 185-mile walk across New Hampshire concluded Friday at an NH Rebellion rally in Nashua, a few blocks from where I live. The rally doubled as a 114th birthday party for the late Granny D, whose 3200-mile walk across America deserves some amount of credit for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform of 2002.
At the rally, Lessig said:
Before we started this walk, we did a poll that found that 96% of Americans believe the influence of money in politics must be reduced. ... But the reason why the pundits and the politicians don't talk about it is that 91% of us believe it's not going to happen. It can't be done. We want it, but we won't get it. Now I told those statistics to John Sarbanes, one of the congresspeople who has been most important in pushing the reform. And he said to me, "That's wonderful. That means we're the 5%."
Lessig thinks the movement to reduce the corruption of our democratic system is in at least as good a position as the Civil Rights movement was when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus. He does a very good job of creating a sense of history, and raising the possibility that fighting for a worthy cause at a time when so few people believe it can succeed might be something you'll tell your grandchildren about.
[BTW: I don't have a link for either this quote or the one at the top of this post. But I heard it live and I have an audio recording.]
New Hampshire will try again to pass Medicaid expansion. Even the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire supports it, but we haven't been able to get it through our Republican-controlled Senate.
The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act is coming up for a vote in the House. An earlier version was passed by the House in 2011, but failed in the Senate. At that time, Mother Jones reported that it could have some nasty results:
In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they'd have to determine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion. ... If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.
... Under standard audit procedure, a woman would have to provide evidence to corroborate facts about abortions, rapes, and cases of incest, says Marcus Owens, an accountant and former longtime IRS official. If a taxpayer received a deduction or tax credit for abortion costs related to a case of rape or incest, or because her life was endangered, then "on audit [she] would have to demonstrate or prove, ideally by contemporaneous written documentation, that it was incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger," Owens says.
So if you get raped, save your receipts.
You really have to wonder what conservatives would come up with if they did want big government to intrude in people's lives.
Eventually, I'm planning to do a full review of Ian Haney-Lopez' new book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. But for now, Salon has made an article out of the chapter on colorblindness.
Dog whistling cannot be resisted by refusing to talk about race, for this only leaves constant racial insinuations unchallenged, operating in the background to panic many whites. Indeed, dog whistle racism is not only protected by colorblindness, it rests fundamentally on colorblind myth-making.
Slate's Zack Kopplin explains how Texas' charter schools are a big loophole through which tax dollars are flowing to teach the most unscientific varieties of Creationism, as well as right-wing Christian views of history and society.
Another mall shooting. Is there a tipping point anywhere?
Coal is supposed to be the cheap form of energy. But that's only if you ignore the cost of stuff like 
